Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China ...
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Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
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Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China: An empirical
study
Anqi Shen1
ABSTRACT Through an empirical study, this article explores the overall profile of female traffickers of
children in China and their role and performance in the trafficking processes. Its contribution to
the human trafficking literature lies in its focus on female perpetrators in particular. The article
provides an overview of the international literature on female traffickers as well as contemporary
knowledge about internal child trafficking in China. Empirical data from incarcerated traffickers
suggest that portraying female traffickers as active players of criminal networks obscures the
structural problems affecting female child traffickers. The short-term result is that the problems
of female offenders are ignored, and the long-term impact is policy-making that is disconnected
from the lived experiences of an important population. From a gender perspective this study
suggests that female child traffickers are offenders as well as victims of social and gender
inequalities in China’s reform era. This study also proposes that internal child trafficking in
China should be brought in the international and Anglo-American debates surrounding human
trafficking.
KEYWORDS Child trafficking, female trafficker, China, qualitative study
Introduction
Human trafficking literature suggests that human trafficking, especially trafficking in women and
children for sexual exploitation, commonly involves women as perpetrators and that they may
assume an active and prominent position (see, for example, Siegel and De Blank, 2010).
1 Anqi Shen is Reader in Law at Teesside University, UK. She is the author of Offending Women in Contemporary
China: Gender and Pathways into Crime (Palgrave, 2015).
Contact: School of Social Sciences, Business and Law, Teesside University, Borough Road, Middlesbrough TS1
3BA, UK. Email: [email protected].
CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
Provided by Northumbria Research Link
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Elaborating on national data, the United Nation Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC, 2014, p. 27)
finds that 28 per cent of convicted human traffickers were women whose roles in the human
trafficking processes often “require frequent interaction with victims.” Siegel (2011) argues that
female participation in human trafficking reflects the gender defined social roles in a broader
society. The present study pays attention to women’s involvement as perpetrators in internal child
trafficking in China and it aims to further illustrate the complex nature of human trafficking as a
social phenomenon. Based on empirical data, it also seeks to make contributions to the
comparative efforts that are needed to identify the nature and extent of human trafficking as a
global as well as local problem.
Trafficking in women and children has been a nationwide problem throughout Chinese
history (Biddulph and Cook, 1999). Ren (1996) suggests that the continuation of child trafficking
must be situated in the context of the Chinese tradition that places children in a subordinated social
position. In feudalist China, children were regarded as the property of their parents and the selling
or buying of children was legally and morally acceptable until the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China in 1949. Today, the child trade is explicitly prohibited but child trafficking
remains a social problem that has survived even the economic reforms started in the late 1970s.
Child trafficking is defined in the Chinese Criminal Law 1997 under Section 240, together
with trafficking in women:
Trafficking in women or children involves acts including kidnapping, abducting, purchasing,
trading, facilitating and transferring women or children with an intention to sell. It is
punishable with between five and ten years imprisonment. With aggravating factors, it is
punishable with a maximum ten years imprisonment or a life sentence. Anyone who commits
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this offence with aggravating factors under extremely serious circumstances may be
punished with the death penalty.
The law specifies aggravating factors including, for example, being the leader of a trafficking
group, trafficking three or more children, using violence, stealing or kidnapping children and
causing severe bodily harm or deaths in trafficking operations. While the law does not define
extremely serious circumstances, selectively reported court cases seem to suggest that they refer
to a combination of aggravating factors, such as being primary traffickers (usually organisers),
having trafficked a large number of children (for example 223 in the Jiang Kaizhi case), carrying
out child trafficking across many regions, and continuously trafficking in children for a long period
of time (for example over four years in Yu Lixiang’s case).
In the current law, purchasing children is a separate offence and punishable with a maximum
three years imprisonment. The aim is to suppress the demand in the child trade. Alongside the law,
a series of policy documents have been issued to serve as statutory interpretation to clarify the law,
recognise the crime reality, and direct law enforcement actions that aim to repress human
trafficking. For example, the Opinion on Tackling Trafficking in Women and Children was jointly
issued by the Supreme People’s Court, Supreme People’s Procuratorate and Ministry of Public
Security (MPS) in March 2010 (hereafter, ‘Opinion 2010’). It states:
Picking up abandoned children and subsequently selling them may amount to child
trafficking. Stealing or kidnapping children initially for adoption but subsequently selling
them constitutes child trafficking.
It goes on to clarify that “parents selling their own children for illegitimate gain constitutes child
trafficking.” However –
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Parents giving away their own children for private adoption, even when receiving a small
amount of “nutrition fee” or “appreciation money”, does not amount to a crime, so long as
they do so due to financial hardship or in accordance with the old tradition that values boys
and devalues girls, and not to seek illegitimate gain.
Thus, the Chinese law provides a localised definition of human trafficking that is in line with, but
not identical, to the United Nation Protocol on Trafficking in Persons to reflect the local crime
problem. What is clear is that China prohibits treating children as commodities and under no
circumstances the buying and selling of children can be acceptable. In addition, through identifying
several unique characteristics of internal child trafficking, the law and policy concerning internal
child trafficking in China is de facto a law against illegal adoption.
Aiming to eradicate the child trade, the top-down national anti-trafficking campaign, known
as “da-guai” (anti-trafficking), is launched from time to time to target the crime when it is viewed
as an imminent threat to social order and often results in a large number of arrests. However,
despite the enforcement efforts child trafficking is persistent and develops in new ways (Biddulph
and Cook, 1999).
In human trafficking research, studies on child trafficking in China are sparse. Existing
literature (see, for example, Ren, 1996, 2004; Zhao, 2003) has examined the root causes, the nature
and estimated scale of the problem but rarely focuses on female perpetrators. Shen, Antonopoulos,
and Papanicolaou (2013) produced a study and suggested that the majority of child trafficking
incidents in China involved women as perpetrators who played a recognisable role throughout the
trafficking processes but did not explore female traffickers in a great detail.
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Through an empirical study that listens to female traffickers’ own voices, this article aims
to explore the overall profile of the female child traffickers, the role they played and their
performance in the trafficking processes so as to make contributions to international literature on
human trafficking and that concerning female perpetrators in particular. It starts with an overview
of trafficking literature on female traffickers and of what is known about child trafficking and
female child traffickers in China. This serves to place the present study in the international
criminological framework and also provide some contextual background. This framing is
intentional, in light of recent work suggesting there are several frameworks for understanding
trafficking and slavery (Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2015; see also Brysk and Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2012).
Following the methodology section, it presents the empirical findings to achieve the aims of the
study and finally the concluding section summaries the evidence presented and offers several
implications for theory, policy and practice.
Women Perpetrators in Human Trafficking: A literature review
In international literature regarding human trafficking, women and gender are evident usually in
stereotype about vulnerable female victims (Barberet, 2014) whilst female perpetrators – the
complexity of their lives and their experiences in trafficking operations and in the criminal justice
process – tend to be overlooked. However, several recent studies have started to look into women’s
involvement in human trafficking as perpetrators, in which female traffickers are investigated,
typically through a cultural analysis, in the context of trafficking in women and children for sexual
exploitation in transnational settings. The findings indicate geographical and cultural variations in
women’s level of participation. For example, in Nair’s (2004) study in India, nearly half of the
trafficked persons reported that their traffickers were women, whilst in Israel about 10.5 per cent
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of the human traffickers were females (Levenkron, 2007) and in Italy women represented seven
per cent of Albanian traffickers operated between 1996 and 2003 (UNODC, 2009).
Existing literature also shows that the roles that women play in trafficking networks is
culturally/ethically shaped. For example, it is found that West African women, Nigerian madams
in particular, ran transnational trafficking networks and played significant and multiple roles,
including organiser, recruiter, trafficker, exploiter, and enforcer. It claims that West African
women are traditionally active players in the public sphere and the power of women is evidence
in “cultural art” of the region (see, Arsovska and Begum, 2014; Iacono, 2014; Mancuso, 2014) and
it is in this cultural setting that female criminality in transnational human trafficking is embedded.
In the same context, Mancuso (2014) observes that only women with economic, social and
relational resources are able to manage the entire trafficking process and actively participate in
decision making. Thus, both gender and class positions seem to shape women’s roles in trafficking
operations.
In the Balkans, however, females tend to be partners in crime and supporters in criminal
networks and women usually play peripheral roles. This is interpreted in the context of “a long-
lasting patriarchal history in which women are taught to obey their husbands and accept their
submissive roles” (Arsovska and Begum, 2014, p. 104). Therefore, the passiveness of Balkan
women in transnational human trafficking reflects the deeply rooted gender subordination of
women in the region. By contrast, in the Dutch context, women are found active in recruiting girls
and controlling them, especially if they originate from the same countries and/or work also as
prostitutes; “Being able to talk to them and to take care of them, they are also able to control them
and/or exploit them, with or without a male companion” (Kleemans, Kruisbergen, and
Kouwenberg, 2014, p. 25).
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All of these studies make important contributions to the trafficking literature by highlighting
the issues of cultural diversity in gender role, gender power and gendered performance in human
trafficking commonly involving trafficked women and children for sexual exploitation typically
in transnational settings. In a special issue of the Annals published in May 2014, two articles talk
of domestic child trafficking: one looks at pimps’ association with underage prostitution in a
Canadian region (Morselli and Savoie-Gargiso, 2014) and the other investigates commercial
sexual exploitation of children in the United States (Marcus, Horning, Curtis, Sanson, and
Thompson, 2014). Both articles challenge conventional stereotypes about teenage prostitution and
the pimp-prostitute relation in the current, dominant trafficking narrative. However, they do not
aim to specifically examine female offenders. Distinctively, Keo (2014) and Keo, Bouhours,
Broadhurst, and Bouhours (2014) researched both domestic and transnational human trafficking
in Cambodia and their research had a particular focus on female traffickers and child trafficking
for illegal adoption is also included in the discussion. Their findings will be used to compare with
the results from present study.
In the existing literature, geographical and cultural differences do seem to raise interesting
questions about women’s roles and performance in human trafficking activities. China – the most
populous country in the world and a geographical context that has long been outside the
mainstream international academic research – provides an important and unique opportunity to
study this subject and to produce novel findings (Weitzer, 2014) about women in human trafficking
and women in crime in general.
Women’s Involvement in Child Trafficking in China: The cultural context
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Although child trafficking in China is generally under-researched, a handful of studies have
revealed that trafficking in children in the country is largely for domestic illegal adoption that is
mainly driven by several deeply-rooted traditional beliefs (see, for example, Biddulph and Cook,
1999; C. Y-Y. Chu, 2011; Ren, 2004; Shen et al, 2013). Three cultural traditions are particularly
influential. First, parents favoured large families and believed that “the more children, the better
life” (Shen et al., 2013, p. 35). When a family could no longer have a child of their own, purchasing
one was an option or even a desire. Second, in traditional Chinese society, only a male heir could
carry on the family name and thus prolong the family’s existence. Since daughters were deemed
to be outsiders – as they would marry out one day – sons were conventionally expected to take
responsibility for their aging parents. Therefore, Chinese parents historically preferred sons to
daughters. While a family which could not have a son(s) of their own might consider adopting one,
those living in unsustainable conditions who had more than one daughter might decide to give
their daughters away. Third, traditional Chinese culture values family ties. In this cultural context,
enabling a full family unit with parents and children – sons and daughters, just like match-making,
is a social good (Shen, 2015). Therefore, people going between child buyers and givers/sellers
were not morally condemned. These cultural norms have survived the economic reforms especially
in rural China.
In the field of child trafficking in China, despite difficulties, efforts have been made to not
only estimate its scale but also identify its operational characteristics. The United Nations Inter-
Agency Project (UNIAP, 2015) on Human Trafficking, for example, retrieved from 800 articles
in a study of trafficking cases reported in print media between 2006 and 2007 and found that the
main means of trafficking were fraud and deception (37 per cent), kidnapping (26 per cent), abuse
of power or a position of vulnerability (17 per cent), and physical violence (5 per cent). It appears
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that children are easy targets of human traffickers and the use of physical violence is rarely
necessary. Thus, child trafficking does not seem to have “gender barriers” for women (Zhang,
Chin, and Miller, 2007).
In China, policy documents tend to be issued when a crime problem has become a public
concern. For example, Opinion 2010 was issued when human trafficking had gained increasing
momentum. Apart from urging law enforcement to be strengthened to respond to the crime, it
identified several characteristics of internal child trafficking. For example, it indicated that babies,
usually girls, could be abandoned by their parents due to a financial hardship in their family or
because of the traditional gender preferences. Abandoned babies may be picked up by strangers
who may keep them or subsequently sell them to others. For the same reason, parents may give
away their own children and they may even accept a small amount of monetary reward although
financial gain is not their intention. However, some parents do sell their own children for illicit
gain. Moreover, children may be stolen, snatched or kidnapped and subsequently sold in the
criminal market. Earlier, the MPS Opinion on Implementation of Law and Policy Tackling
Trafficking in Women and Children was issued in 2000, which acknowledged a lack of awareness
of human trafficking and the trafficking law among the population in the remote, poverty-stricken
mountainous regions where human trafficking was prevalent and it also stressed the difficulties
raising awareness in those regions. Academic literature suggests that the regions concerned are the
impoverished rural areas in Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, and Sichuan provinces with poor public
transport and poor communication with the outside (C. Y-Y. Chu, 2011; Ren, 1996, 2004; Shen et
al, 2013; Shen, 2015).
Popular media tend to report high profile trafficking cases said to involve “major trafficking
rings” or “gangs” (Custer, 2015; Ng, 2015; Thornhill, 2015) and trafficking groups are believed to
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have become increasingly sophisticated (see, Beard, 2014; Patience, 2015), whilst there are also
different observations (see, for example, Xinhua News, 2012). Media analysis suggests that child
trafficking is often related to domestic adoption. However, children are also kidnapped or lured
away from home to be sold into a life on the streets, begging for change or pickpocketing strangers
while under the control of adult criminals (Brown and Xu, 2014; Custer, 2013; Patience, 2015).
Typically, buying and selling children is viewed as a lucrative trade in the criminal market
(FlorCruz, 2013; Patience, 2015; Thornhill, 2015) and it is thought that child traffickers are driven
by ‘either desperation or by greed’ (Ng, 2015).
In the Chinese language news media, women are often found to participate in child
trafficking, who usually operate with others but may also act independently (CCTV, 2009; China
News, 2010a, b; Fuzhou News, 2010; Taihai News, 2013; Xinhua News, 2012, 2013a, 2014).
Women appear to be active players as they not only are frequently involved but also play prominent
roles in trafficking operations (China News, 2010a, Fuzhou News, 2010; Xinhua News, 2007, 2009,
2012). Through describing how trafficked babies are roughly handled in the trafficking processes,
female traffickers tend to be depicted as conscienceless, evil women who are ‘greedy’ and ‘cruel’
(CCTV, 2009; China News, 2010a, b; Daily Mail, 2013; New York Times, 2003; Xinhua News,
2010; 2013a, b).
Although media sources tend to provide rich anecdotal information, one needs to be sceptical
when attempting to use journalist accounts in an academic inquiry because, as Levi (2008) points
out, popular media present a disproportionate emphasis on individual pathologies rather than the
complex, but relevant, structural causes. Lee (2011) even argues that our knowledge about human
trafficking is limited, incomplete and often shaped by media and information flows. This study,
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grounded by empirical evidence, hopes to discover some facts about female child traffickers in
China.
Methodology
This article is primarily based on the data drawn from a larger research project on gender and crime
in China (Shen, 2015). Since human traffickers are difficult to identify as they operate in a black
market that is clandestine in nature, it was considered that conducting interviews in prison was a
possible route to convicted female traffickers.
Interviewing is a particularly valuable method for feminist researchers to gain insights into
the world of their research subjects (Hesse-Biber, 2007) and a body of academic studies on female
criminality has relied on interviews in the prison environment with convicted offenders (see Bailey,
2013; Chui and Gelsthorpe, 2004; Keo, 2014). However, access to prisoners is not an approach
typically adopted by academic researchers in China. In the present study, gaining access was a
painstaking process, which was done largely through the author’s personal contacts, rather than a
well-defined, top-down formal approval procedure. Enormous effort was required to seek
permissions from key gatekeepers. In addition, strict obligations were imposed on the researcher
to ensure confidentiality and anonymity. For this reason, all names of respondents in this article
are pseudonyms. Considering the research aims as well as practical factors, semi-structured
interviews were used to collect the female traffickers’ narratives and biographies.
As of July 2013, 44 women were incarcerated for child trafficking in the sample prison, from
whom ten were randomly selected, and all of the ten women agreed to participate in the interviews.
Although had it been possible interviewing all of the 44 women would have strengthened the data
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and the article, given that it is extremely difficult to access prisoners in China and the restrictions
imposed on the researcher by the prison administration as to when and how the fieldwork could
be undertaken, interviewing ten women was more realistic than interviewing more.
Following Bailey (2013), the interview was divided into four sections to document as much
detailed and accurate information as possible: (1) family background; (2) living conditions prior
to detention; (3) crime information; and (4) respondents’ self-reflections. The first two sections of
the interview produced a detailed socio-demographic profile of the respondents. The third section
provided data about their living conditions so as to identify the women’s motives for entering the
child trade. And the open-ended fourth section encouraged self-reflections from the respondents.
As in other prison systems (see, for example, Bailey, 2013), recording devices are strictly
prohibited by the Chinese prison authority. As a result, interviews were recorded by note-taking
in Chinese and the field notes were word-processed and simultaneously translated into English as
soon as practically possible after the interviews on the same date. Data analysis was conducted
manually which started while the data were being processed.
It is acknowledged in qualitative research that participants may lie (Manheim & Rich, 1986)
or they may reconstruct their activities (Sharpe, 2012). In the present study, I find that occasionally
the respondents preferred not to expose the very details of their crimes. To deal with incomplete
or seemingly “doubtful” data, my strategy was to leave them as they were to avoid making
imaginary assumptions as doing that may create so much bias that could render fieldwork invalid
or distorted (Becker, 1967). To ensure accuracy, secondary information were used to corroborate
the respondents’ accounts. Therefore, in addition to primary data, secondary information was
gathered, which included the published scholarly work and open source materials, especially news
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reports. In data analysis, empirical findings drawn from the interviews were compared with the
claims, evidence and allegations in the secondary sources. While judicial material is not included
in this dataset as China adopts a civil law legal system in which judicial ruling is not a source of
law and thus cases are not comprehensively compiled, judgments are selectively reported. The
reported cases were consulted whenever necessary.
The limitations of research methodology in this study are fully acknowledged. Firstly, China
is a vast country with enormous regional variations. Since the data was largely drawn from
interviews with a small number of convicted female child traffickers in one prison, the findings
here cannot be taken as an accurate reflection of females’ involvement in child trafficking in China.
Secondly, as already noted, this study uses journalistic information, where necessary, to illustrate
some aspects of internal child trafficking in the country. It is worth noting that journalistic
information should be treated with caution (see Gall, 2006; Shen & Winlow, 2013). On the other
hand, media sources offer anecdotal data that can be useful in ‘critical intellectual reconstruction’
(Layder, 2013, p. 91). Thus, journalistic information, through collaboration with primary data and
evidence from other secondary sources, helps ‘enhance the reliability, validity and generality of
findings’ (Layder, 2013, p. 91). Of course, this study can be replicated and hopefully it will inspire
future even more rigorous empirical research.
Overall Profile of the Female Child Traffickers
Table 1 below illustrates the overall socio-demographic profile of the respondents.
Table 1. Socio-Demographic Profile of the Respondents (n=10), July 2013
Respondent Age Domicile Education Marital Status Occupation Prison Term (years)
GDX 31 City Illiterate Married Migrant peasant 6.5
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HSF 35 City Illiterate Married Migrant peasant 5
JLY 69 Township Illiterate Widowed Hostel owner 4
LLJ 46 City Illiterate Married Migrant peasant 10
LXH 28 City 2-year schooling Married Migrant peasant 5
PGM 46 City Illiterate Married Migrant peasant 5
PXM 42 Village Illiterate Married Peasant farmer 5
QMC 58 Village Illiterate Widowed Peasant farmer 12
WGY 33 Village Illiterate Divorced Peasant farmer 6
XY 37 Village Illiterate Married Peasant farmer 5
The respondents
As Table 1 shows, the respondents were aged between 28 and 69, seven were married and all of
them were mothers of one or more children. Prior to their arrests, except JLY – a resident of a
small township, all other respondents were born in impoverished rural areas in Yunnan, Guizhou
and Henan provinces, of whom four were peasant farmers living in their birth places and five were
migrants working in the labour-intensive industries in cities. Two respondents were disabled: HSF
developed cerebritis just before school age and XY was half deaf from birth. Thus, the convicted
female child traffickers participated in this study were largely peasant farmers and migrant peasant
workers – China’s most disadvantaged social groups (Goodman, 2014). This finding is similar to
that of Keo et al (2014) in the Cambodian context: female human traffickers, including child
traffickers, were socioeconomically disadvantaged women.
The interviews reveal that nine respondents had no previous convictions whilst JLY was
convicted of sheltering others for prostitution about ten years ago. GDX, whom was caught while
transporting a baby in the present case, reported that she sold an unwanted baby previously which
went undetected. LLJ was a first time offender but convicted of two accounts of child trafficking.
This supports the finding of Shen et al (2013) that indicate that child traffickers tended to be
opportunistic offenders who did not usually have a long history of human trafficking or criminal
offending.
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Social and familiar background of the respondents
A striking finding in this study is that – with the exception of 28-year old LXH, who was a primary
school dropout – all respondents were illiterate. This confirms previous studies that suggest high
illiteracy among rural female population and also among child traffickers (Ren, 1996; Zhao, 2003).
However, the results here offer a more nuanced account and show that younger women in their
twenties and thirties who grew up in the reform era may still be illiterate or semi-illiterate and that
the respondents were commonly subjected to profound gender discrimination against their
education in rural China, as WGY, a 33-year old peasant from Yunnan, remarked:
My family did not have spare money to pay for my school fees but all my brothers had
finished primary school. In our area, only boys were expected to read and write. My sister
and I did not have a chance.
Being excluded from schooling, girls stayed at home and were expected to take household
responsibilities. As the oldest child of the family, once LXH dropped out of school she was
burdened with household chores, including looking after her younger siblings. Several respondents
reported that they were asked to participate in manual work at very young ages. For example, LLJ
began working in the field when she was nine and WGY started at seven or eight years of age.
The impact of deprived childhood – exclusion from formal education, household chores,
early manual work, and an impoverished life in general – is profound on rural women and the
majority of the respondents faced multiple forms of marginalization. Like female traffickers in
Cambodia (Keo et al, 2014), the respondents had no particular knowledge, skills and experiences
and therefore had limited legitimate opportunities. In this context, human trafficking appears to
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offer an illegitimate opportunity to earn money. Thus, female human traffickers are simultaneously
“perpetrators and also victims” (Keo et al, 2014, p. 212).
WGY was a peasant farmer and a widow who was bringing up her children on her own.
Being illiterate, the only opportunity for her to earn a little extra cash was to work occasionally at
a building site mixing sands along with male workers at a rate of 30-40 yuan (10 yuan =
approximately US$1.57) per day. Poor living conditions combined with a lack of money-making
opportunities seemed to have rendered the uneducated rural woman susceptible to criminal
activities. According to WGY: “300-400 yuan for undertaking a train journey to transport a baby
was so tempting that I had no hesitation to take the opportunity.” After all, compared with her
earning from doing heavy manual work, the amount promised to her for transporting a baby was
good income.
Emotional encounters of the respondents in child trafficking
Chinese women are culturally expected to be caregivers in the family and community (Zhang et
al, 2007). Like in many countries, women who have children themselves become perpetrators of
crimes against children are often condemned for breaking the law as well as for “breaking every
culturally sanctioned code of femininity and womanhood” (Jewkes, 2011, p. 137). Therefore, as
indicated earlier, female child traffickers are commonly depicted as conscienceless evil women in
the popular media. However, the data in this study seem to suggest that the respondents were
ordinary women who had guilty feelings and ‘normal’ emotional experiences. LLJ’s story, for
example, shows that while making choices female child traffickers may be influenced by their
maternity instinct:
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An old lady in my village showed me a baby boy... She said she found him at the roadside
and asked whether or not I wanted to have him. The baby had a lovely tubby face and
beautiful silky skin and I loved him straightaway… I took him home but soon found
something was wrong with him… he could not smile… I took him to hospital and he was
diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy.
LLJ said that she could not afford the baby’s medication and later her sister helped her have the
baby sold. She was in tears when describing what subsequently happened: “The police told me
that the baby’s problem was soon found out by the seller family. They could not find us so [they]
started to torture the baby and finally abandoned him.”
Similarly, HSF could also have avoided being involved in child trafficking. Her account was
that she did not get involved for money but wanted to help: “The acquaintance… said the baby’s
father had died, her mother was terminally ill, and she needed a better family to bring her up.”
HSF therefore looked for a buyer through a man living in a different city and later received a 1,000
yuan introducing fee from him. According to herself, “had I known the baby was stolen I would
not have done that for only 1,000 yuan… I am a mum myself.”
Quite often child traffickers claimed that they did not know the babies handed over to them
were stolen, kidnapped or abducted. Their claim is not totally unsupported. Illiteracy and poor
education may have hampered the peasant farmers in the remote, mountainous areas and the highly
mobilised migrant workers from receiving the necessary knowledge of child trafficking that would
have enabled them to make better informed decisions when a money-making opportunity came up.
It should be recognised that such a lack of awareness may have shaped the female traffickers’
choices and their level of participation.
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Although the child trade gives rise to abuses and ill-treatment of trafficked children, no
evidence in this dataset suggests that the babies were badly treated by the respondents. QMC found
an abandoned baby at the roadside with his face covered with ants: “I took him home… I bought
a milk bottle to feed the baby with water and milk. Later I fed him with lan-hu-mian (semi-
liquidised noodles).” All of the respondents said that they handled the trafficked children in the
normal way and nothing they did was unacceptable. However, even if this account can be proven,
buying and selling children is a criminal offence in accordance with the Chinese law and how
trafficked children are treated is only an influential factor for sentencing.
Thus, the data here refute the notion that female child traffickers are conscienceless, and
suggest they were ordinary women who seemed to find motherhood fulfilling and joyful (Jewkes,
2011). LXH, who kidnapped a three-year old girl, illustrated this possibility:
I am unable to give birth again due to a medical problem... But I love children… The girl
was so pretty, sweet... After a few days (when we were together) I felt she was my real
daughter. I started to buy more things for her... One day she suddenly called me “mum.”
In the interview, LXH did not want to disclose the details of her crime, such as her intention to
kidnap the girl and what was planned to deal with her, but kept referring to the girl as her daughter.
LHX’s incomplete story may seem to make little sense, but according to Sina News (2011), some
female traffickers did change their mind and want to keep the trafficked children at home as their
own. It appears that the female traffickers here are women who are maternal, whilst some women
in the same or similar conditions might not value and enjoy motherhood for a variety of reasons
(Jewkes, 2011).
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Therefore, involvement in child trafficking does not automatically make female perpetrators
cold-blooded, conscienceless evil women (Shen, 2015). To a certain extent, the image of female
child traffickers has been distorted by the patriarchal media which doubly condemn them of being
criminals as well as bad women.
Female Traffickers’ Entry, Their Role and Performance in Child Trafficking
Child trafficking is not usually a one-man business and broadly speaking it is a form of organised
crime. While previous studies suggest that human trafficking in China involved complicated, ever-
growing networks (Biddulph and Cook, 1999; H. Z. Chu, 1996; Ren, 1996, 2004), recent Chinese
language news reports find that trafficking groups are kinship-based and loosely structured with
associates who are usually members of the extended families, friends and acquaintances (China
News, 2010a, b; Fuzhou News, 2010; Xinhua News, 2012). The present study offers further
evidence in support of this notion.
Female traffickers’ entry and their roles in the trafficking processes
Keo et al (2014) reveal that the entry requirements in human trafficking are low for women in
Cambodia and the same finding appeared in the present study. Table 2 below illustrates the
respondents’ entry points and the role(s) they played in child trafficking.
Table 2. Women’s Entry Points and Their Role(s) in the Child Trade
Entry point Frequency Respondents
Recruitment 8
- Picking up abandoned babies 1 QMC
- Accepting babies given by others 3 GDX1, HSF, LLJ2
- Paying for ‘unwanted’ babies3 3 GDX, LLJ, XY4
- Kidnapping 1 LXH
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
20
Facilitation 4
- Sheltering 3 LLJ, LXH, QMC
- Looking for buyer 1 HSF
Transportation 6
- For relatives/acquaintances for a fee 2 PGM, WGY
- For husband 1 PXM
- Transporting the self-recruited babies 3 GDX, QMC, XY
Sale 2
- Acting as an ‘agent’ for seller 1 JLY
- Selling an baby to an acquaintance 1 GDX
Notes:
1. GDX was caught while transporting a baby in the present case. Previously she was given an unwanted baby by
an acquaintance and subsequently “gave” the baby to another acquaintance and received an “introducing fee.”
2. LLJ was convicted of two accounts of child trafficking: (1) a baby boy was given to her free of charge; (2) she
paid to get an “unwanted” baby from an acquaintance.
3. The interviews reveal that several respondents came to know from the investigators and at their trails that the
babies whom they handled were not unwanted but stolen, abducted, or kidnaped.
4. XY and her husband paid 2,000 yuan for a baby on behalf of her sister-in-law who wanted to have babies to “help
others.”
As Table 2 illustrates, like that in human smuggling (see, Zhang et al, 2007), services in child
trafficking are narrowly defined and can be provided by different individuals. Although nothing
should prevent women from entering the child trade at any stage, the female traffickers in this
sample appeared to be more frequently involved at the recruitment and transportation stages and
typically played more than one role in trafficking operations.
The interview data reveal that the female traffickers obtained babies through a variety of
channels, including picking up abandoned babies from roadsides, accepting babies given by others
with or without a fee, paying for “unwanted” babies usually where there were ready buyers, and
kidnapping young children. It appears that recruiting children does not require significant capital
investment or the use of violence that tends to prevent females entering criminal enterprises
(Steffensmeier, 1983).
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
21
Clearly, sheltering and transporting babies were not too challenging for the respondents, as
they were mothers and had brought up their own children. The data show that three respondents
were asked by their relatives and acquaintances to transport babies and they did not even know
names of the buyers awaiting them at their destinations. Previous research suggests that female
traffickers are thought to have inherent advantages in sheltering and transporting babies because
they are less likely to be suspected (Shen et al, 2013).
The sale of children in the criminal market often involves a middleperson(s) to go between
buyers and sellers. Here, JLY acted for a seller – a young man who was selling his own new born
daughter:
He is a relative of an old friend of mine. He wanted me to help him tell mai-jia (the seller)
that his wife had died and he was unable to raise the baby up and how much money he
wanted. He promised to give me 2,000 yuan zhong-jie-fei (agent fee) if the baby was sold.
It does seem to be true that “apart from basic interpersonal skills, no particular knowledge and
abilities are necessary to participate in trafficking” (Keo et al, 2014, p. 212). Here, even illiteracy
was not a barrier for JLY to play her role and facilitate a transaction in the child trade.
In the present study, the respondents’ involvement in child trafficking was largely
opportunistic with little planning and organisation. Clearly, they were engaged in the child trade
by chance and trafficking in children did not seem to be what they deliberately sought out. For the
majority of them, child trafficking was only a one-off event and not even a “short term strategy”
(Zhang et al, 2007, p. 720).
In addition, like their female counterparts in Cambodia (Keo et al, 2014), the female child
traffickers here did not appear to be part of structured trafficking networks, but on the other hand,
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
22
none of them had performed alone and they tended to rely on one or two lines of personal contacts,
typically their husbands, sisters, in-laws, cousins, friends and acquaintances from the same village
or known at the workplace. Therefore, although child trafficking may not involve well organised,
sophisticated criminal groups, it does require a certain level of collaboration between individuals.
In this sense, child trafficking is a form of organised crime despite the loosely-structured networks
and unexperienced, amateur players.
Overall, the data suggest that the child trade has low entry requirements that allow the poor
and undereducated women to get involved to do something “simple” and make quick money.
However, easy entry does not guarantee women’s “successes” in the illicit business.
Female traffickers’ performance in child trafficking
The data seem to suggest that interviewees had little control in the child trade – no matter which
role they played – and that they were less frequently engaged at the sale stage. This is probably
due to a lack of resources. Even where the respondents obtained the children independently and
wanted to sell them for gain, they seemed to have to rely on others to complete the transactions
and had little say about how much they would want to get. In the child market, a transaction
between a desperate seller and a willing – and often keen – buyer would logically guarantee a
payment. This does not mean, however, that every player in the process could have a fair share of
the proceeds. Indeed, some might not get anything.
Child trafficking is often depicted as a lucrative business (Shen et al, 2013) and the present
study reveals that the respondents could potentially receive payments in the range of 300/400 to
25,000 yuan for their services. However, the reality is that the amount they could eventually
receive depended on a number of factors and nothing was guaranteed. JLY was promised a fee
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
23
that amounted to over a quarter of the sale price for acting on behalf of the seller but did not receive
anything in the end. Being a woman in her late 60s, she could do little to enforce the payment in
the criminal market. According to the respondents, there was little chance to negotiate the price.
Holding the babies for longer was troublesome and they were keen to quickly pass the babies on
to someone else, get a little extra cash, and go away to carry on their normal lives. With this
mentality, how much the female traffickers could gain largely depended on how lucky they were
in a particular transaction.
Thus, in the criminal trade, the poor, uneducated, and inexperienced rural women did not
appear to have much chance to succeed. If making little or no money in a transaction was bad luck
for them, there were worse ones, such as detection. PGM, WGY and XY were detected en route
transporting babies. PXM, a 42-year old peasant farmer was asked by her husband to take a baby
to Xinxi – a small township over two thousand kilometres away from their village in Yunnan:
I am an illiterate and had never left home before. I was scared of going with the baby on my
own, so I asked my cousin to go with me. She was also an illiterate and had never gone out
before.
PXM and her cousin were arrested at the railway station of their destination. PGM was also caught
at the railway station for transporting a baby: “… When I saw the uniformed policemen I became
very nervous. They… came to ask where the baby was from. I told them she was not mine but I
said she was unwanted. They arrested me.”
In fact, even early detection might not be the worst case scenario for the female traffickers.
The uneducated powerless women seemed to be easy targets of sophisticated professional
criminals who were ready to take advantage of the women’s vulnerability. WGY was offered an
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
24
opportunity to transport a baby for a man whom she met briefly at the building site where she
worked occasionally. She believed his story about the baby but when she was arrested and
questioned about the baby she was unable to provide the man’s full name and whereabouts.
Consequently, the male trafficker went untraced whilst WGY was held criminally liable. QMC, a
58-year old illiterate peasant, was victimised by two male criminals in a trafficking operation:
On my way home (after transporting a baby), I was stopped by a man at the railway station.
He said he found a bag of money next to us and wanted to share it with me… When we were
just about to count the money, another man came and said the money was his and some of it
had already gone missing. He searched me violently and took all my money away.
The criminal market is full of uncertainties, illegality and danger and it appears that the uneducated,
unexperienced and unorganised individuals were unable to fully cope with it. Whilst sophisticated,
well organised, and professional child traffickers do exist, this study shows that some traffickers,
like the respondents here, are amateur and less calculated. It is perhaps this group of traffickers,
often women, who are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated. As Beare (2012) observes in a
different geographical context, “there is a tendency for enforcement to have the effort of
‘eliminating’ the most unsophisticated and providing more of a monopoly to those with the skills
and resources to avoid detection” (p. 269).
Discussion and Conclusion
Since the late 1990s, approaches toward human trafficking appear to have been precipitated upon
the notion of transnational organised crime (Shen et al, 2013). For Hobbs and Cunnighan (1998),
this understanding has an important shortcoming. They argue that “global-transnational-
international studies of organised crime… ignore or substantially underestimate the importance of
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
25
the local context as an environment within which criminal networks function” (p. 289). This
Chinese case further illustrates regional characteristics of human trafficking: no evidence in this
dataset shows that the female traffickers were part of well-structured criminal networks. Rather,
their networks were “small, poorly resourced and loosely organised” – as that identified in
Cambodia (Keo et al., 2014, p. 215). The findings here further challenges not only trafficker
stereotypes but also that of human trafficking and organised crime.
Taking a “micro-level research” approach, this article highlights trafficking as “much more
complex and variegated than the image popularised in the dominant discourse” (Weitzer, 2014, p.
20). As the data show, the female child traffickers here were largely migrant peasant workers and
peasant farmers – both were born and brought up in the underdeveloped, remote mountainous
regions where child trafficking is prevalent. They commonly had a deprived childhood living in
impoverished conditions and received little, if any, formal education as a result of poverty and
gender discrimination against girls and women. As members of China’s marginalised and
disadvantaged social groups, their life choices were constrained. As this article shows, the female
child traffickers were ordinary women and mothers: while being opportunistic offenders who
committed crimes against children for illicit gain, they had not lost humanity entirely. Although
there were virtually no barriers for them to participate in the trafficking processes in which they
did play a variety of roles, their performance, as the data indicate, was hampered by their lack of
interpersonal skills and life experiences. Consequently, they were easy targets for both law
enforcement and more sophisticated and professional criminals. Thus, the present study challenges
the distorted image of female child traffickers in the popular media which has resulted from a
shortage of accurate information.
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
26
Based on empirical evidence, this article offers several implications for theory, policy and
practice. Firstly, it suggests that portraying female traffickers as active players of criminal
networks hides the structural problems of women engaged in child trafficking and female offenders
in general, and therefore distorts policy-making. Describing female child traffickers as ruthless,
conscienceless, and evil women hurts more than it helps, since it justifies harsh penalties for
women. As of 3 May 2015, an ongoing internet survey reported that 75 per cent of the respondents
supported the death penalty to be more frequently imposed on child traffickers (qq.com, 2015). As
Table 1 above illustrates, harsh sentences have already been imposed on female traffickers. Apart
from that, little seems to have been done to deal with demand and supply in the child trade.
Secondly, this study in the context of China offers a unique case for further inquiries into
women’s involvement in general criminal activity and organised crime in particular. The findings
here lend support to Keo et al (2014, p. 220) who conclude that female human traffickers were
“pushed by a lack of legitimate opportunities and pulled by the presence of illegitimate
opportunities, engage in unsophisticated criminal activities for modest gains.” The research
findings in both studies challenge popular assumptions or claims. While this study finds that the
female child traffickers were not affiliated to any structured organised criminal groups, it does
recognise child trafficking as a form of organised crime. By doing so it challenges “the taken-for-
granted, mainstream accounts featuring a certain exceptionalist notion” and thus holds that
organised crime should be construed as “a particular instance of contemporary society’s war cries,
entrepreneurship and profit” (Antonopoulos and Papanicolaou, 2014, p. 3) and “unlicensed
capitalism” in the term of Hobbs (2013). In fact, through a gendered lens, this article is not about
human trafficking or organised crime, but is about equality and fairness. It argues that to identify
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
27
female child traffickers as offenders as well as victims of social and gender inequalities helps to
direct fact-based policy responses.
As we have seen, in China, internal trafficking in children, often new born babies, is largely
for domestic illegal adoption. Thus, human trafficking in the local context is not a phenomenon
associated with migration, transnational organised crime and trafficking in women and children
for sexual exploitation. Accordingly, international trafficking law is highly localised in China to
reflect the local crime reality, local circumstances, and local cultural norms. Therefore, the Chinese
case further highlights the tension between international advocacy networks and national and local
efforts to work with communities to combat common problems, such as human trafficking, which
impact on many, if not all, countries in the world despite its varied characteristics.
Toward the end of this article I argue that internal child trafficking in China should be
incorporated into the long-running debates surrounding human trafficking occupying the Anglo-
American world in which commonalities can be easily identified (Choi-Fitzpatrick, 2015) whilst
the perspectives of “others” have become the marginalised that has little impact on theory, policy
and practice.
Finally, this article is unique in that interviewing prisoners in China is very rare and few
international studies on crime and criminal justice in the Chinese context have achieved this,
although similar and even more sophisticated research into these areas has been undertaken in
other cultural settings. In the field of human trafficking, high quality local empirical research is
called for as it can help closely monitor the local trends and patterns and thus provide accurate,
reliable debates that support evidence-based policy making and the accumulation of more studies
Female Perpetrators in Internal Child Trafficking in China
28
of this nature will help address “some fundamental questions about the complex dynamics of
human trafficking” (Weitzer, 2014, p. 21).
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editor for their helpful comments and
suggestions. The opinion and all errors are my own and I hope that they recognise their influence.
This article draws from the fieldwork funded by Teesside University (UK) under their IVA scheme,
2013.
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